On India's little-visited North-East Frontier, a killer elephant is reported to be on the rampage. Stalking Assam's paddy fields, he has murdered dozens of farmers, crushing their bodies and mutilating them. Local forestry officers issue a warrant for the elephant's destruction and call in one of India's last licensed elephant killers. Journalist Tarquin Hall, the author of Mercenaries, Missionaries and Misfits, read about the ensuing hunt in a Delhi newspaper, and flew to Assam to investigate.

"This remarkable book is more than just a ripping yarn: it is also a beautifully observed, richly textured portrait of a little visited corner of a well-trodden country at a crucial turning point in its history. One moment Tarquin is lumbering on elephant-back through the sounds and smells of a village that has not changed in centuries; the next he is being threatened by political terrorists and ivory poachers.... In the end, though, it is Tarquin's quest for—and final discovery of—the legendary elephant's graveyard that haunts the memory long after one has closed the cover of a wonderful book that should become a classic."—Daily Mail (London)